Blood, sweat, and cheers

Springfield's ultimate fighters take it to the limit

Justin Robbins knelt on
the living-room floor in his Piper Glen home with his 4-year-old daughter,
Sydney. The pair held hands, closed their eyes, and prayed for Matt Hughes
— a self-proclaimed country boy from Hillsboro and nine-time Ultimate
Fighting Championship welterweight champion who was fixing to fight Georges
St. Pierre in a live, nationally televised showdown.

Robbins had been traveling from Springfield to
Hughes’ southern-Illinois home for weeks, training with the
mixed-martial-arts star and preparing him for his upcoming battle (Hughes
lost and now holds a 43-7-0 record). A Sacred Heart-Griffin wrestler turned
MMA fighter, Robbins soon followed Hughes again, this time to his brand-new
gym, the Hughes Intensive Training Squad, in Granite City. There he has joined the growing ranks of young men
who make it their job to pour blood and sweat into training eight hours a
day, five days a week.

Thanks in part to Hughes’ popularity and his
efforts to prime a new stock of Illinois fighters, MMA — a
combination of jiu-jitsu, boxing, kickboxing, and wrestling — has
exploded across the state.

Springfield bounded into the action with Warrior
Concepts, the capital city’s full-service MMA training facility,
which attracts everyone from local fighters hoping to ascend to the next
level to guys and gals searching for a new hobby. Even legislators, who
once deemed the sport barbaric, cleared the path for MMA’s continued
acceleration this month by establishing new guidelines that legalize the
sport.

“This sport has grown from what was little more
than organized street brawling to a legitimate sport,” Daniel
Bluthardt, director of the Division of Professional Regulation, says.
“It has grown to the point where the sponsors of the legislation said
— and I would agree with them — that it’s time that the
state regulates it to make sure it is safe and fair.” Robbins began wrestling
in the fifth grade, qualified for the state championships as a high-school
student, and briefly flexed his muscles at MacMurray College in
Jacksonville before returning home to work at Inno-tech Plastics, the
family business, as a machine operator.He married his girlfriend, Katie, on June 2, 2001,
and seemed ready to settle for a quiet life.

Instead he kept thinking about
his wrestling days, the UFC fights he watched on VHS tapes, and the stories
he heard from his UFC fighter roommate in college. Robbins missed being in shape and competing and knew
that if he started MMA he’d be hooked. He began training with Gregg
Giddings, a Springfield martial-arts master. He then transferred to Warrior
Concepts and trained and fought for nearly two years before making the
decision to go full-time last summer.

Scot Ward

After working with Hughes at his training camp in
December, Robbins felt a connection with world-class coaches such as Marc
Fiore and Matt Pena and fellow fighters like Robbie Lawler at the H.I.T.
Squad. Even though his wife and two daughters still lived in Springfield,
he knew that the move would be the best thing for his career.

“If I’m going to work, I want to do
something that I truly love and have a passion for,” Robbins says.
“At the level I’m competing at, I can’t go to work from 9
to 5 and then go train for two hours. It’s just not going to work
like that.

“So I decided to put all of our marbles into
this thing and see what happens.”

Robbins wakes up and helps his wife get Sydney and
1-year-old Kamryn ready for daycare. He leaves his house at 7:45 a.m. and
gets to Granite City around 9:10 a.m. For the first hour and a half, the
fighters work on cardio, weightlifting, and exercises such as climbing
ropes and flipping tires. Robbins boxes for an hour, takes a break, and
then boxes again after lunch. In a pro class that runs from 6 to 7:30 p.m.,
the full-time fighters wrestle, grapple, or spar with one another,
depending on the night of the week. Robbins showers, leaves the gym, and
arrives home around 9:20 p.m. He follows the same schedule Monday through
Thursday.

“Thursdays are hard because you’re
already beat up for the week and tired,” Robbins says. “I just
want to go home and see my family.”

He spends Thursday nights in Granite City and works
out for the last time on Friday morning. Fighters circuit train and do
plyometrics but are then sent home to relax for the weekend. Robbins, who says his strengths are his cardio and
his heart, never imagined that he’d be spending every day with Hughes
and his other trainers. The confidence and knowledge they give him, he
says, make his whole week worth the effort.

“They’re pushing you every day and
you’re doing the same stuff they’re doing,” Robbins says.
“It gives you peace of mind, confidence, and lets you rest peaceful
at night knowing that you’re doing the right thing.”After watching the UFC
gain momentum, Scot Ward decided 14 years ago to set up his own shop in
Springfield. He used his background in jiu-jitsu, boxing, muay thai kickboxing, and
wrestling to develop his MMA skills and then opened Warrior Concepts to
show other fans the moves.

Today Ward — a correctional officer at the
Logan Correctional Center — works alongside five other coaches who
teach nearly 40 people, including kids as young as 12 years old, all
aspects of MMA. Although he trains 16 amateur and professional fighters, he
says his gym isn’t just about pushing people into competitions.

“I have a lot of guys who come in to train
because they want to get self-confidence, learn the discipline, and have
fun,” Ward says. “Maybe they don’t ever want to get in
the ring. They have both options.”

Ward says they begin with basic wrestling moves and
work their way through the process. Students first find out how to take an opponent down.
After getting the basics of “shooting in” and forcing an
opponent to the ground, students learn how to position themselves using
wrestling and Brazilian jiu-jitsu moves. Once in position, the student
submits and defeats the opponent using classic maneuvers such as the
triangle choke (a move in which the opponent’s neck is trapped in a
triangle formed by the opponent’s own arm and the attacker’s
thigh and calf) and heel hooks (the attacker uses the opponent’s heel
to twist the leg and knee). Along the way students also learn boxing and muay thai kickboxing
tactics for the stand-up portion of the match. Ward helps students facing upcoming fights identify
and compare their strengths and their opponents’ strengths. Then
they’ll outline a game plan.

Brian Carter

“Every fighter is different,” Ward says.
“I might have a great wrestler, and we need to work on stand-up and
defense and conditioning. Or I might have a good striker that I need to
teach to defend the takedown or get up from the bottom.”

Warrior Concepts offers a five-day-a-week program,
but, because all of his fighters have full-time jobs, Ward encourages them
to get in at least three weekly workouts. Because of their limited training
time, he also asks that they condition on their own so they can work on
technique at the gym. Brian Carter, Warrior’s primary heavyweight
fighter, who works as a union carpenter, refers to the training as
“Marine Corps boot camp on steroids.”

In addition to running stairs and sprinting up and
down hills, Ward pushes Carter and the other fighters to jump rope, throw
sandbags, and beat on tires with sledgehammers. They don headgear, gloves,
shin pads, and chest protectors and spar to prepare for the wear and tear
of matches.

Most of the students have experience in physical
sports such as wrestling or boxing, Ward says, so they’re often
successful. Guys who like to start fights in bars, he continues,
don’t usually survive the training.

“It’s a matter of putting in the proper
training time for every fight and staying with it,” Ward says.
“That’s what separates an amateur from a pro and a pro from a
champion. You’re not going to get from here to there if you
don’t put time in.”When asked about his
last fight, Robbins says he logged tons of training hours but missed
another crucial element of MMA fighting: He didn’t execute his game
plan.

On May 31 at the Prudential Center, in Newark, N.J.,
Robbins was on top of the world. It was his first contracted fight in a
series of three with Elite Extreme Combat, an organization similar to the
UFC. He was listed on a show card that debuted live on CBS and on the
Internet, and he was sponsored by national MMA backer Tap Out.

Robbins competed in the 140-pound, or featherweight,
division against Wilson Reis, a Brazilian-born fighter and jiu-jitsu
instructor from Pennsylvania. He knew that his advantage lay in striking,
so he planned to keep the game on his feet and away from potential ground
submissions — but, Robbins says, he didn’t defend the takedown
and ended up on the ground anyway. He was defeated with a rear naked choke
submission — Reis got behind him, squeezed his neck with the crook of
his elbow, and pushed on his head — after four minutes and six
seconds in the first round.

“You have to go into every fight with a game
plan, and, if you don’t live by your game plan, don’t expect
anything else but failure,” Robbins says. “That’s what
happened. I didn’t live by my game plan at all.”

Robbins was almost caught earlier in the fight by an
armbar submission, when Reis hyperextended his elbow backward and above his
head. The sound of ligaments popping, Robbins says, must have caused his
opponent to back off.

“I think he just let go because he was
disgusted at how it sounded,” Robbins says. “It sounded like
sticking your hand in a bag of potato chips and squeezing
everything.”

Like many MMA fighters, Robbins is no stranger to
injuries. He broke his hand when he fought a guy who was 6-foot-4 and
weighed in at 155 pounds — a giant compared with his own 5-foot-5 and
then-132-pound frame. He won the fight but ended up in surgery and had a
pin sticking out of his knuckle for six weeks.

Robbins’ last serious injury occurred in
August, in a Las Vegas show, when he tore his posterior cruciate ligament
in his knee during the first minute of the first round. He finished the
fight, went home, and spent the next two-and-half months in rehabilitation.

Robbins admits that his wife worries about his
getting hurt but says she supports his MMA career. She’s held special
prayer services for him at West Side Christian Church and has been to all
of his fights but the last one. Robbins says she gets into it and offers
proof in video footage on which she can be heard cheering and screaming in
the background.

Even though some parents may disapprove, Robbins
says, he also likes that his daughter enjoys watching his fights on TV or
on the Internet.

Robbins, whose record is now 12-4-1, has premiered in
two pay-per-view showcases and says he feels like he’s “on the
top of the food chain” in his weight class. MRI results showed a
fractured elbow, but doctors say a cast isn’t needed and the injury
should heal on its own. He has already returned to the H.I.T. Squad,
working on what went wrong and looking to win the next time.

“At this level of the game, it’s mostly
mental,” Robbins says. “It depends on who shows up and who
executes their game plan the best. Do I have all of the tools to be a world
champion? Absolutely.” On June 1, MMA became an
official sport in Illinois.

Previously a provision in the professional
boxing act provided an exemption to MMA — what Bluthardt calls
“backdoor regulation.” Now, he says, the sport is fully
regulated and must adhere to a stricter set or rules and standards.

Most of the regulation revolves around safety and
fairness issues. To address safety, legislators crafted rules for new
insurance requirements, stating that every fighter must be insured for
$50,000. The state will also begin testing fighters for everything from HIV
to hepatitis to steroids. Before fighters are allowed to fight, Bluthardt
says, they must provide copies of all medical records and tests within 48
hours of the match and may be subjected to random drug testing.

Legislators also looked at fairness, Bluthardt says,
and hashed out a new process for state approval of matches. To avoid
mismatches between someone who has a 15-0 record and someone who has a 4-20
record, he explains, legislators decided that it was important for each
event to be reviewed independently of the promoters. The state will review
all submitted information, ensure that all participants — fighters,
promoters, corner people — are licensed, and assign appropriate,
licensed referees and judges. Bluthardt says the state hopes that the growth in MMA
will mirror that of professional boxing, especially now that the effort has
been made to improve the quality and safety of the sport.

“We’ve had more professional boxing
events than we’ve ever had,” he says, “so we’re
taking that same approach to mixed martial arts.”

Robbins agrees that the new laws will be good for MMA
in Illinois, especially after his experiences in already regulated Nevada
and New Jersey. The shows will feature real fighters, he says, because
promoters won’t be willing to put money into guys who won’t
draw tickets. Promoters will have to play by the rules, he says,
which includes paying for all injuries. When Robbins broke his hand, he was
only paid $500 by the show promoter but doled out $1,000 for medical costs.
That wouldn’t happen under new guidelines, he says.

In addition to managing and training, Ward also works
as a Springfield show promoter. His last show, on May 17 at the Illinois
Building, featured 12 fights and attracted nearly 1,200 fans.Ward says he’s not sure whether the new rules
will work in his favor, especially if it means big cost increases. Not only
will he have to increase his current insurance policy from $10,000 to
$50,000, but he’ll also have to pay for medical tests and medical
costs. That could lead to higher-priced tickets and less action for the
fighters, he says.

“They have to look at it so a common guy can
put on a good show and let some fighters get some experience and be able to
feed these other big shows,” Ward says.

At any rate, most fighters and promoters agree that
the rules will help weed out stereotypes of their sport. MMA was once
compared to cockfighting and dog fighting, especially because fights are
held in a caged octagon or ring.

In the beginning, Ward says, this perception worked
because it attracted fans to pay-per-view and gave them something
they’d never seen before. But the ultimate-fighting image eventually
backfired when it began to draw negative attention from the press and
legislators.

“They used that as a tool to sell: no rules,
anything goes, ultimate fighting,” Ward says, “so then
everybody was, like, ‘Holy shit, this is going to be crazy. They go
in there, in a cage, like two dogs.’ It worked, but then it
didn’t work.”

Eight or nine years later, Ward says, people are
realizing that mixed martial artists are well-rounded athletes with an
arsenal of traditional techniques. He adds that MMA isn’t as
dangerous as other combat sports. There’s no standing 10-count, as
there is in boxing, and there are only three five-minute rounds. If a
fighter can’t intelligently defend himself, the referee steps in and
calls the match, and a fighter who wants to quit can “tap out”
at any time and end the fight.

MMA, Robbins says, has
changed his life. He doesn’t have to get up every morning and head
off to a job he hates. Instead, he says, he gets to wake up and spend all
day at the gym. Maybe he’ll live to be 200, he jokes.

The relative amount of danger that surfaces during a
match makes him appreciate his family and their support, and the intensity
of the sport has developed his will and his mind. Once he gets in the cage, he says, it’s all
about proving who works the hardest and who wants it the most.

“You don’t have to depend on anybody else
to get the job done,” he says. “If you want it, you have to get
it yourself. If you lose, you have nobody to blame but yourself.”
Contact Amanda Robert at arobert@illinoistimes.com.